Hartford, Connecticut – Today, March 9, 2016, the Performance Evaluation Advisory Council (PEAC) voted to recommend to the State Board of Education to decouple teacher evaluations and the state’s standardized assessment for another year. This means that districts will still not be required to tie results from the Smarter Balanced Assessment to their teachers’ evaluation results in 2016-2017, although they will retain the option to do so. In response to PEAC’s decision, Jeffrey Villar, Executive Director of the Connecticut Council for Education Reform (CCER), made the following statement:

“PEAC’s recommendation to delay the full implementation of Connecticut’s teacher evaluation system for a third consecutive year raises a great deal of concern. The teacher evaluation model that the state envisioned and developed in 2012 was designed to be balanced–including both objective and subjective measures of teacher performance. Because that system has never yet been fully implemented, we have been prevented from fully understanding how well it works and whether it needs to be refined. What we do know, however, is that our state must pursue a system that holds educators and administrators accountable for improved outcomes, and that provides meaningful and appropriate professional development for our hard-working educators.

“We fully understand that the members of PEAC are concerned about identifying a perfect metric by which to incorporate learning measures into evaluations. But we should not let ‘perfection’ become the enemy of ‘good.’ I urge PEAC to accelerate its pace.

“Let’s not forget that each child has only one opportunity for a quality education. We need to start implementing evaluations in a way that is meaningful, and making adjustments as we go. Our students deserve so much better than years and years of delay.”

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About the Connecticut Council for Education Reform

The Connecticut Council for Education Reform (CCER)–a statewide, non-partisan, 501(c)(3) not- for-profit organization–works to close the achievement gap and raise academic outcomes for all students in Connecticut. The achievement gap is the disparity in academic achievement between children from low-income families and children of color, and their peers. We advocate for state policies and local practices that research shows have the best chance of raising achievement for high-need student populations.